The EU’s incoming Environment Commissioner, Janez Potocnik, has pledged to bring a renewed focus on biodiversity to his new job, saying it may have been sidelined in the past. During a 13 January hearing in which MEPs greeted him with repeated bursts of applause, the Prius-driving Slovenian native said, “Doubling the forces in the Commission, which will take care for climate and the environment, is a good sign for all of us. In a way, many issues which were a bit in the shadow today [...] could, by the fact that I am responsible for taking care of environment, be upgraded”. He has also promised to turn his hand to implementing existing water and soil rules, but stopped short of agreeing to a moratorium on new legislation as called for by deputy Julie Girling (ECR, UK).

Calling into question lacklustre progress on the Landfill Directive (99/31/EC), Girling said, “Maybe we should have a moratorium on new legislation until we’re sure what we have been doing is working and implemented”. While Potocnik defended his lack of in-depth knowledge on the subject - “You can’t expect I would know each case in detail” - the commissioner-designate said he would do everything in his power to make sure those member states that have not properly transposed EU rules into national law will do so. He told Chris Davies (ALDE, UK) that he would not be a mere paper pusher. “My legal role is to enforce [the rules]. That is what I intend to do. On the other hand, it’s important I offer a hand to member states.”

He committed to what he calls a “holistic” approach to the new portfolio, saying he will push his colleagues in agriculture, fisheries and science to take on a more ‘green’ approach. “If we all work together then we can succeed,” he said. “It’s not enough to achieve our environmental objectives, we need a horizontal approach including agricultural and strucutral policies, science policies - this is the only thing that can change our future.”

Money soon found its way into the debate, with Potocnik suggesting more than once that the EU should include the cost of natural resources in product prices, making the most efficient use of raw materials. “If things are internalised in the price of production then the right signal is coming to the consumer,” he said. “Sustainability and environment should be seen as working hand in hand with the economy and not against it. The carbon-free economy should be extended into a resource-efficient economy.” He also said there was a need for more direct funding for ‘green’ growth, which is a theme at the centre of the EU’s new ten-year plan for growth and jobs.

One of the main problems with Potocnik’s dossier is the sheer number of pieces of legislation he will have to deal with. However, Austrian EPP deputy Richard Seeber said of the current research commissioner that he “showed knowledge of the dossier and EU procedures”. And his mooted successor, Irish commissioner-designate Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, called his legacy at the helm of the EU’s research and science policy “impressive”. He did not escape a grilling on his personal credentials to take up the job, either, and had to admit to keeping the temperature in his own living room at a constant 21 degrees. “I am unfortunately a person who prefers hotter places to colder ones,” he said. But he swiftly saw off a challenge from climate sceptic Paul Nuttall (EFD, UK), “Even if you are right and I am wrong [...] the policies we are leading are still the right ones”.

First on Potocnik’s to-do list is to make a trip to the European Chemicals Agency in Helsinki with the new industry commissioner to sort out abiding problems with REACH, the regulation on the safe use of chemicals (EC 1907/2006). The regulation entered into force in 2007, but Swedish MEP Carl Schlyter (Greens-EFA) called into question the the mooted list of potentially harmful substances (Annex XIV) and the regulation’s definition of so-called persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals (PBTs). The Slovenian commissioner said of the problems, “If you ask me if I’m hapy with what I have currently on the table my answer is ‘no’”. He added that he was in touch with putative industry chief Antonio Tajani, and will tackle the issue “immediately”.n

Background

The volleyball-playing outgoing research chief has had plenty of experience in the EU institutions, and comes off as a competent lawmaker. An economist by education, he worked at several of Ljubljana’s major economic institutes for ten years, before entering politics late, as a minister-counsellor in the Slovenian prime minister’s cabinet in 2001. He headed the team negotiating Slovenia’s accession to the EU, holding the post of Europe minister for the two years before his country joined, in 2004. He worked closely with outgoing German Commissioner Günter Verheugen when the latter was enlargement chief, shadowing him for six months before taking up his new post in Barroso’s first Commission, in 2004. He speaks Slovenian, English, Croatian, Serbian and a bit of French. As reasearch commissioner, he once said, “Europe will exist as a ‘green’ continent or it will not exist at all. The world will exist as a blue planet or it will not exist at all.”